Fake headline of the day: The Pirate Bay “moves” to North Korea

Blog post by "Kim Jung-Bay" claims the site moved to North Korea. It hasn't.

Has the notorious piracy website The Pirate Bay truly fled to the country most inhospitable to Internet users of all kinds—North Korea? That's what the Pirate Bay site was saying today, complete with a re-worked ship logo that proudly displayed the colors of North Korea. A blog post on TPB's blog said the site has been offered "virtual asylum" by the regime of Kim Jong-Un and has taken it up on it.

If it seems wildly implausible, it is. And if this all sounds like a joke you've heard before, well, you have. The same website made the same joke back in 2007 on April Fool's Day. Apparently in 2013, they couldn't quite wait until April 1. Or maybe they were just so excited by today's news of North Korea weirdly playing host to NBA star Dennis Rodman that they decided to get this year's DPRK humor going a little early.

This much is true: the Pirate Bay has been on the move lately. It recently had to move its hosting services out of Sweden and then was apparently booted from Norway after that nation's Pirate Party couldn't stand up to pressure being applied by copyright owners.

Today TPB posted the North Korea announcement under the moniker "Kim Jung-Bay," revealing that the site was "invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network." (The post clearly is describing North Korea but incorrectly calls it the "Republic of Korea," which is actually the formal name of South Korea.) Kim Jung-Bay continues:

This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high. At the same time, companies from that country is chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.

Tracing the site's IP address with a tracking utility does show the traffic routes through a North Korea IP address. But routing can be spoofed or hacked fairly easily. Some users on Hacker News have observed that the site speeds continue to correspond to a site hosted somewhere in Europe, not in North Korea. Another hacker by the moniker Will originally suggested TPB was actually somewhere near Cambodia, but he has now written a more extensive follow-up agreeing with the European hypothesis.

Tom Paseka, an engineer at Web security company CloudFlare, confirmed to Ars that The Pirate Bay announcement is "almost certainly" a fake. Border Gateway Protocol is used to make routing decisions about how to move Internet traffic, and it's based on a "trust model" that makes it relatively simple to insert a bogus "autonomous system" or AS number into the route.

"In this case, they've dropped AS131279, the North Korean backbone's network number, into the mix," Paseka said in an e-mail to Ars. "The routing is inconsistent with how AS131279 does their routing—they usually route via China Unicom, AS4837. The Pirate Bay's prefixes are not routed via this path."

The story has been taken quiteseriously in some places. However, Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge has come to see it as a hoax, as he told Foreign Policy a few hours ago.

“We’ve been in talks with them for about two weeks, since they opened access for foreigners to use 3G in the country,” a Pirate Bay insider told us. “TPB has been invited just like Eric Schmidt and Dennis Rodman. We’ve declined up until now.”

So, stay tuned for pics of Frederik Neij sipping cognac with Rodman and Kim Jong-Un. They might be released sometime in early April.